HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership (with featured article "What Makes an Effective Executive," by Peter F. Drucker)

by Harvard Business Publishing

And just as important, different situations call for different types of leadership.

Self-regulation, which is like an ongoing inner conversation, is the component of emotional intelligence that frees us from being prisoners of our feelings.

those with leadership potential are motivated by a deeply embedded desire to achieve for the sake of achievement.

Interestingly, people with high motivation remain optimistic even when the score is against them. In such cases, self-regulation combines with achievement motivation to overcome the frustration and depression that come after a setback or failure.

Consider the challenge of leading a team. As anyone who has ever been a part of one can attest, teams are cauldrons of bubbling emotions. They are often charged with reaching a consensus—which is hard enough with two people and much more difficult as the numbers increase. Even in groups with as few as four or five members, alliances form and clashing agendas get set. A team’s leader must be able to sense and understand the viewpoints of everyone around the table.

Globalization is another reason for the rising importance of empathy for business leaders. Cross-cultural dialogue can easily lead to miscues and misunderstandings. Empathy is an antidote. People who have it are attuned to subtleties in body language; they can hear the message beneath the words being spoken. Beyond that, they have a deep understanding of both the existence and the importance of cultural and ethnic differences.

leaders with empathy do more than sympathize with people around them: They use their knowledge to improve their companies in subtle but important ways.

Social skill, rather, is friendliness with a purpose: moving people in the direction you desire, whether that’s agreement on a new marketing strategy or enthusiasm about a new product.

they work according to the assumption that nothing important gets done alone.

organizations are held together by information rather than by ownership or command.

But problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.

Good executives don’t raise another matter for discussion. They sum up and adjourn.

Management is about coping with complexity.

Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change.

No one yet has figured out how to manage people effectively into battle; they must be led.

The equivalent leadership activity, however, is aligning people. This means communicating the new direction to those who can create coalitions that understand the vision and are committed to its achievement.

Planning is a management process, deductive in nature and designed to produce orderly results, not change. Setting a direction is more inductive.

What’s crucial about a vision is not its originality but how well it serves the interests of important constituencies—customers, stockholders, employees—and how easily it can be translated into a realistic competitive strategy.

planning process establishes sensible quality targets,

the organizing process builds an organization that can achieve those targets,

a control process makes sure that quality lapses are sp...

Adaptive work is required when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge.